The workers' defiance was written in red ink. “If you are Chinese you will definitely not sign – one for all and all for one,” a striking Honda employee wrote over a form urging his colleagues to renounce further industrial action.

Suicidal angst is giving way to worker solidarity in southern China, as a factory strike that has halted the Japanese carmaker's nationwide operations enters its second week.

Most worryingly for the Chinese government, the industrial unrest at Honda and other big employers in Guangdong province is raising questions about the nature of work itself on 21st century factory floors.

A new generation of alienated Chinese workers is signalling that it is determined to fight back.

“We're different from our parents' generation,” said Cha Jinhua, a Guangdong-based labour activist. “Their wishes were simple – earn some money and return to their home towns. We want to stay in the cities and enjoy our lives here. But we demand respect.”

The angst on China's shop floor hit international headlines just over a week ago when a ninth worker killed himself at a huge factory belonging to Foxconn, the Taiwanese contract manufacturer for groups such as Apple, Dell and HP.

The company's usually media-unfriendly founder, Terry Gou, rushed to the facility in Shenzhen, a manufacturing centre bordering Hong Kong, to defuse the crisis. Within hours of his departure, a 10th Foxconn worker was dead and the company's image-conscious clients said they would launch their own investigations into the tragedies.

The ensuing and unrelated strike at Honda's transmission plant in Foshan, another factory town, has added an unexpected political element to China's evolving labour crisis. The right to strike was excised from the Chinese constitution in 1982, and attempts by workers to organise outside the official All China Federation of Trade Unions are frowned on by Beijing.

Yet Honda's workers have achieved this, while three other car factories that rely on the plant's components have had to close as well.

“The strike and negotiations are continuing,” one Honda worker told the Financial Times yesterday.

“We are doing this ourselves. The [official] union doesn't represent us and never showed up [to the talks]. We don't even know who the union chairman is. We want to elect our own chairman but the request was turned down.”

If he and his colleagues succeed in securing higher wages and voting in their own union representative, as they are demanding, their victory will have far wider repercussions than the quiet acts of individual desperation witnessed at Foxconn.

When confronted by worker suicides or industrial unrest, the initial tendency of Foxconn, Honda and other multinational manufacturers is to react with bewilderment.

Their shop floors are modern, clean and well-lit, they point out. Recreational facilities are first-rate. Last week at Foxconn, Mr Gou proudly showed reporters his factory's Olympic-sized swimming pool.

However, this appears to be missing the point. It is the often-repetitive, tedious nature of assembly-line work that is haunting workers, who are further exhausted by constant overtime and night shifts.

“Whether you live on the farm or in a factory, you still have to work,” said a tired 18-year-old student trainee at Honda, whose shift runs from 10.20pm to 7.20am.

While not actively involved in the strike, he is supportive of his older colleagues' industrial action.

He has refused to sign the “promise note” in which Honda asked workers to pledge that they “absolutely will not lead, organise or participate in work slowdowns, stoppages or strikes”.